27 Aug 2014 Emu by example 27 Aug 2014

This post introduces emu, a pet project which I have been developing on a casual stop-start basis for the past two years. Emu is a fast, incremental, rotating snapshot backup program with checksum verification and branch support, strongly inspired by git and Apple’s Time Machine.

It was born out of a desire to be able to conveniently and reliably backup a huge amount of data to multiple locations without having to resort to extensive and error prone bash scripting, and which didn’t bundle up data in arbitrary binary blobs. I wanted a system which was simple, transparent, and easy to use. So I made one.

The following blog posts contain a quick and hands-on introduction to the seven primary functions of emu, intended to get people up and running with it quickly. The concepts are simple and the commands will seem familiar to anyone with experience of git. Note that development is in alpha stage and things change quickly. This blog pertains to the current stable release, 0.1.49. Be sure to check out the project’s GitHub page for the latest updates.